<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" xmlns:epub="http://www.idpf.org/2007/ops" epub:prefix="z3998: http://www.daisy.org/z3998/2012/vocab/structure/, se: https://standardebooks.org/vocab/1.0" xml:lang="en-GB">
	<head>
		<title>X</title>
		<link href="../css/core.css" rel="stylesheet" type="text/css"/>
		<link href="../css/local.css" rel="stylesheet" type="text/css"/>
	</head>
	<body epub:type="bodymatter z3998:fiction">
		<section id="chapter-10" epub:type="chapter">
			<h2>HENRY JEKYLL’S FULL STATEMENT OF THE CASE</h2>
<p>
I was born in the year 18— to a large fortune, endowed besides with
excellent parts, inclined by nature to industry, fond of the respect of the
wise and good among my fellowmen, and thus, as might have been supposed, with
every guarantee of an honourable and distinguished future. And indeed the worst
of my faults was a certain impatient gaiety of disposition, such as has made
the happiness of many, but such as I found it hard to reconcile with my
imperious desire to carry my head high, and wear a more than commonly grave
countenance before the public. Hence it came about that I concealed my
pleasures; and that when I reached years of reflection, and began to look round
me and take stock of my progress and position in the world, I stood already
committed to a profound duplicity of life. Many a man would have even blazoned
such irregularities as I was guilty of; but from the high views that I had set
before me, I regarded and hid them with an almost morbid sense of shame. It was
thus rather the exacting nature of my aspirations than any particular
degradation in my faults, that made me what I was, and, with even a deeper
trench than in the majority of men, severed in me those provinces of good and
ill which divide and compound man’s dual nature. In this case, I was
driven to reflect deeply and inveterately on that hard law of life, which lies
at the root of religion and is one of the most plentiful springs of distress.
Though so profound a double-dealer, I was in no sense a hypocrite; both sides
of me were in dead earnest; I was no more myself when I laid aside restraint
and plunged in shame, than when I laboured, in the eye of day, at the
furtherance of knowledge or the relief of sorrow and suffering. And it chanced
that the direction of my scientific studies, which led wholly towards the
mystic and the transcendental, reacted and shed a strong light on this
consciousness of the perennial war among my members. With every day, and from
both sides of my intelligence, the moral and the intellectual, I thus drew
steadily nearer to that truth, by whose partial discovery I have been doomed to
such a dreadful shipwreck: that man is not truly one, but truly two. I say two,
because the state of my own knowledge does not pass beyond that point. Others
will follow, others will outstrip me on the same lines; and I hazard the guess
that man will be ultimately known for a mere polity of multifarious,
incongruous and independent denizens. I, for my part, from the nature of my
life, advanced infallibly in one direction and in one direction only. It was on
the moral side, and in my own person, that I learned to recognise the thorough
and primitive duality of man; I saw that, of the two natures that contended in
the field of my consciousness, even if I could rightly be said to be either, it
was only because I was radically both; and from an early date, even before the
course of my scientific discoveries had begun to suggest the most naked
possibility of such a miracle, I had learned to dwell with pleasure, as a
beloved daydream, on the thought of the separation of these elements. If each,
I told myself, could be housed in separate identities, life would be relieved
of all that was unbearable; the unjust might go his way, delivered from the
aspirations and remorse of his more upright twin; and the just could walk
steadfastly and securely on his upward path, doing the good things in which he
found his pleasure, and no longer exposed to disgrace and penitence by the
hands of this extraneous evil. It was the curse of mankind that these
incongruous faggots were thus bound together—that in the agonised womb of
consciousness, these polar twins should be continuously struggling. How, then
were they dissociated?
</p>
<p>
I was so far in my reflections when, as I have said, a side light began to
shine upon the subject from the laboratory table. I began to perceive more
deeply than it has ever yet been stated, the trembling immateriality, the
mistlike transience, of this seemingly so solid body in which we walk attired.
Certain agents I found to have the power to shake and pluck back that fleshly
vestment, even as a wind might toss the curtains of a pavilion. For two good
reasons, I will not enter deeply into this scientific branch of my confession.
First, because I have been made to learn that the doom and burthen of our life
is bound for ever on man’s shoulders, and when the attempt is made to
cast it off, it but returns upon us with more unfamiliar and more awful
pressure. Second, because, as my narrative will make, alas! too evident, my
discoveries were incomplete. Enough then, that I not only recognised my natural
body from the mere aura and effulgence of certain of the powers that made up my
spirit, but managed to compound a drug by which these powers should be
dethroned from their supremacy, and a second form and countenance substituted,
none the less natural to me because they were the expression, and bore the
stamp, of lower elements in my soul.
</p>
<p>
I hesitated long before I put this theory to the test of practice. I knew well
that I risked death; for any drug that so potently controlled and shook the
very fortress of identity, might, by the least scruple of an overdose or at the
least inopportunity in the moment of exhibition, utterly blot out that
immaterial tabernacle which I looked to it to change. But the temptation of a
discovery so singular and profound at last overcame the suggestions of alarm. I
had long since prepared my tincture; I purchased at once, from a firm of
wholesale chemists, a large quantity of a particular salt which I knew, from my
experiments, to be the last ingredient required; and late one accursed night, I
compounded the elements, watched them boil and smoke together in the glass, and
when the ebullition had subsided, with a strong glow of courage, drank off the
potion.
</p>
<p>
The most racking pangs succeeded: a grinding in the bones, deadly nausea, and a
horror of the spirit that cannot be exceeded at the hour of birth or death.
Then these agonies began swiftly to subside, and I came to myself as if out of
a great sickness. There was something strange in my sensations, something
indescribably new and, from its very novelty, incredibly sweet. I felt younger,
lighter, happier in body; within I was conscious of a heady recklessness, a
current of disordered sensual images running like a millrace in my fancy, a
solution of the bonds of obligation, an unknown but not an innocent freedom of
the soul. I knew myself, at the first breath of this new life, to be more
wicked, tenfold more wicked, sold a slave to my original evil; and the thought,
in that moment, braced and delighted me like wine. I stretched out my hands,
exulting in the freshness of these sensations; and in the act, I was suddenly
aware that I had lost in stature.
</p>
<p>
There was no mirror, at that date, in my room; that which stands beside me as I
write, was brought there later on and for the very purpose of these
transformations. The night however, was far gone into the morning—the
morning, black as it was, was nearly ripe for the conception of the
day—the inmates of my house were locked in the most rigorous hours of
slumber; and I determined, flushed as I was with hope and triumph, to venture
in my new shape as far as to my bedroom. I crossed the yard, wherein the
constellations looked down upon me, I could have thought, with wonder, the
first creature of that sort that their unsleeping vigilance had yet disclosed
to them; I stole through the corridors, a stranger in my own house; and coming
to my room, I saw for the first time the appearance of Edward Hyde.
</p>
<p>
I must here speak by theory alone, saying not that which I know, but that which
I suppose to be most probable. The evil side of my nature, to which I had now
transferred the stamping efficacy, was less robust and less developed than the
good which I had just deposed. Again, in the course of my life, which had been,
after all, nine tenths a life of effort, virtue and control, it had been much
less exercised and much less exhausted. And hence, as I think, it came about
that Edward Hyde was so much smaller, slighter and younger than Henry Jekyll.
Even as good shone upon the countenance of the one, evil was written broadly
and plainly on the face of the other. Evil besides (which I must still believe
to be the lethal side of man) had left on that body an imprint of deformity and
decay. And yet when I looked upon that ugly idol in the glass, I was conscious
of no repugnance, rather of a leap of welcome. This, too, was myself. It seemed
natural and human. In my eyes it bore a livelier image of the spirit, it seemed
more express and single, than the imperfect and divided countenance I had been
hitherto accustomed to call mine. And in so far I was doubtless right. I have
observed that when I wore the semblance of Edward Hyde, none could come near to
me at first without a visible misgiving of the flesh. This, as I take it, was
because all human beings, as we meet them, are commingled out of good and evil:
and Edward Hyde, alone in the ranks of mankind, was pure evil.
</p>
<p>
I lingered but a moment at the mirror: the second and conclusive experiment had
yet to be attempted; it yet remained to be seen if I had lost my identity
beyond redemption and must flee before daylight from a house that was no longer
mine; and hurrying back to my cabinet, I once more prepared and drank the cup,
once more suffered the pangs of dissolution, and came to myself once more with
the character, the stature and the face of Henry Jekyll.
</p>
<p>
That night I had come to the fatal cross-roads. Had I approached my discovery
in a more noble spirit, had I risked the experiment while under the empire of
generous or pious aspirations, all must have been otherwise, and from these
agonies of death and birth, I had come forth an angel instead of a fiend. The
drug had no discriminating action; it was neither diabolical nor divine; it but
shook the doors of the prisonhouse of my disposition; and like the captives of
Philippi, that which stood within ran forth. At that time my virtue slumbered;
my evil, kept awake by ambition, was alert and swift to seize the occasion; and
the thing that was projected was Edward Hyde. Hence, although I had now two
characters as well as two appearances, one was wholly evil, and the other was
still the old Henry Jekyll, that incongruous compound of whose reformation and
improvement I had already learned to despair. The movement was thus wholly
toward the worse.
</p>
<p>
Even at that time, I had not conquered my aversions to the dryness of a life of
study. I would still be merrily disposed at times; and as my pleasures were (to
say the least) undignified, and I was not only well known and highly
considered, but growing towards the elderly man, this incoherency of my life
was daily growing more unwelcome. It was on this side that my new power tempted
me until I fell in slavery. I had but to drink the cup, to doff at once the
body of the noted professor, and to assume, like a thick cloak, that of Edward
Hyde. I smiled at the notion; it seemed to me at the time to be humourous; and
I made my preparations with the most studious care. I took and furnished that
house in Soho, to which Hyde was tracked by the police; and engaged as a
housekeeper a creature whom I knew well to be silent and unscrupulous. On the
other side, I announced to my servants that a Mr. Hyde (whom I described) was
to have full liberty and power about my house in the square; and to parry
mishaps, I even called and made myself a familiar object, in my second
character. I next drew up that will to which you so much objected; so that if
anything befell me in the person of Dr. Jekyll, I could enter on that of Edward
Hyde without pecuniary loss. And thus fortified, as I supposed, on every side,
I began to profit by the strange immunities of my position.
</p>
<p>
Men have before hired bravos to transact their crimes, while their own person
and reputation sat under shelter. I was the first that ever did so for his
pleasures. I was the first that could plod in the public eye with a load of
genial respectability, and in a moment, like a schoolboy, strip off these
lendings and spring headlong into the sea of liberty. But for me, in my
impenetrable mantle, the safety was complete. Think of it—I did not even
exist! Let me but escape into my laboratory door, give me but a second or two
to mix and swallow the draught that I had always standing ready; and whatever
he had done, Edward Hyde would pass away like the stain of breath upon a
mirror; and there in his stead, quietly at home, trimming the midnight lamp in
his study, a man who could afford to laugh at suspicion, would be Henry Jekyll.
</p>
<p>
The pleasures which I made haste to seek in my disguise were, as I have said,
undignified; I would scarce use a harder term. But in the hands of Edward Hyde,
they soon began to turn toward the monstrous. When I would come back from these
excursions, I was often plunged into a kind of wonder at my vicarious
depravity. This familiar that I called out of my own soul, and sent forth alone
to do his good pleasure, was a being inherently malign and villainous; his
every act and thought centered on self; drinking pleasure with bestial avidity
from any degree of torture to another; relentless like a man of stone. Henry
Jekyll stood at times aghast before the acts of Edward Hyde; but the situation
was apart from ordinary laws, and insidiously relaxed the grasp of conscience.
It was Hyde, after all, and Hyde alone, that was guilty. Jekyll was no worse;
he woke again to his good qualities seemingly unimpaired; he would even make
haste, where it was possible, to undo the evil done by Hyde. And thus his
conscience slumbered.
</p>
<p>
Into the details of the infamy at which I thus connived (for even now I can
scarce grant that I committed it) I have no design of entering; I mean but to
point out the warnings and the successive steps with which my chastisement
approached. I met with one accident which, as it brought on no consequence, I
shall no more than mention. An act of cruelty to a child aroused against me the
anger of a passer-by, whom I recognised the other day in the person of your
kinsman; the doctor and the child’s family joined him; there were moments
when I feared for my life; and at last, in order to pacify their too just
resentment, Edward Hyde had to bring them to the door, and pay them in a cheque
drawn in the name of Henry Jekyll. But this danger was easily eliminated from
the future, by opening an account at another bank in the name of Edward Hyde
himself; and when, by sloping my own hand backward, I had supplied my double
with a signature, I thought I sat beyond the reach of fate.
</p>
<p>
Some two months before the murder of Sir Danvers, I had been out for one of my
adventures, had returned at a late hour, and woke the next day in bed with
somewhat odd sensations. It was in vain I looked about me; in vain I saw the
decent furniture and tall proportions of my room in the square; in vain that I
recognised the pattern of the bed curtains and the design of the mahogany
frame; something still kept insisting that I was not where I was, that I had
not wakened where I seemed to be, but in the little room in Soho where I was
accustomed to sleep in the body of Edward Hyde. I smiled to myself, and in my
psychological way, began lazily to inquire into the elements of this illusion,
occasionally, even as I did so, dropping back into a comfortable morning doze.
I was still so engaged when, in one of my more wakeful moments, my eyes fell
upon my hand. Now the hand of Henry Jekyll (as you have often remarked) was
professional in shape and size; it was large, firm, white and comely. But the
hand which I now saw, clearly enough, in the yellow light of a mid-London
morning, lying half shut on the bedclothes, was lean, corded, knuckly, of a
dusky pallor and thickly shaded with a swart growth of hair. It was the hand of
Edward Hyde.
</p>
<p>
I must have stared upon it for near half a minute, sunk as I was in the mere
stupidity of wonder, before terror woke up in my breast as sudden and startling
as the crash of cymbals; and bounding from my bed I rushed to the mirror. At
the sight that met my eyes, my blood was changed into something exquisitely
thin and icy. Yes, I had gone to bed Henry Jekyll, I had awakened Edward Hyde.
How was this to be explained? I asked myself; and then, with another bound of
terror—how was it to be remedied? It was well on in the morning; the
servants were up; all my drugs were in the cabinet—a long journey down
two pairs of stairs, through the back passage, across the open court and
through the anatomical theatre, from where I was then standing horror-struck.
It might indeed be possible to cover my face; but of what use was that, when I
was unable to conceal the alteration in my stature? And then with an
overpowering sweetness of relief, it came back upon my mind that the servants
were already used to the coming and going of my second self. I had soon
dressed, as well as I was able, in clothes of my own size: had soon passed
through the house, where Bradshaw stared and drew back at seeing Mr. Hyde at
such an hour and in such a strange array; and ten minutes later, Dr. Jekyll had
returned to his own shape and was sitting down, with a darkened brow, to make a
feint of breakfasting.
</p>
<p>
Small indeed was my appetite. This inexplicable incident, this reversal of my
previous experience, seemed, like the Babylonian finger on the wall, to be
spelling out the letters of my judgment; and I began to reflect more seriously
than ever before on the issues and possibilities of my double existence. That
part of me which I had the power of projecting, had lately been much exercised
and nourished; it had seemed to me of late as though the body of Edward Hyde
had grown in stature, as though (when I wore that form) I were conscious of a
more generous tide of blood; and I began to spy a danger that, if this were
much prolonged, the balance of my nature might be permanently overthrown, the
power of voluntary change be forfeited, and the character of Edward Hyde become
irrevocably mine. The power of the drug had not been always equally displayed.
Once, very early in my career, it had totally failed me; since then I had been
obliged on more than one occasion to double, and once, with infinite risk of
death, to treble the amount; and these rare uncertainties had cast hitherto the
sole shadow on my contentment. Now, however, and in the light of that
morning’s accident, I was led to remark that whereas, in the beginning,
the difficulty had been to throw off the body of Jekyll, it had of late
gradually but decidedly transferred itself to the other side. All things
therefore seemed to point to this; that I was slowly losing hold of my original
and better self, and becoming slowly incorporated with my second and worse.
</p>
<p>
Between these two, I now felt I had to choose. My two natures had memory in
common, but all other faculties were most unequally shared between them. Jekyll
(who was composite) now with the most sensitive apprehensions, now with a
greedy gusto, projected and shared in the pleasures and adventures of Hyde; but
Hyde was indifferent to Jekyll, or but remembered him as the mountain bandit
remembers the cavern in which he conceals himself from pursuit. Jekyll had more
than a father’s interest; Hyde had more than a son’s indifference.
To cast in my lot with Jekyll, was to die to those appetites which I had long
secretly indulged and had of late begun to pamper. To cast it in with Hyde, was
to die to a thousand interests and aspirations, and to become, at a blow and
forever, despised and friendless. The bargain might appear unequal; but there
was still another consideration in the scales; for while Jekyll would suffer
smartingly in the fires of abstinence, Hyde would be not even conscious of all
that he had lost. Strange as my circumstances were, the terms of this debate
are as old and commonplace as man; much the same inducements and alarms cast
the die for any tempted and trembling sinner; and it fell out with me, as it
falls with so vast a majority of my fellows, that I chose the better part and
was found wanting in the strength to keep to it.
</p>
<p>
Yes, I preferred the elderly and discontented doctor, surrounded by friends and
cherishing honest hopes; and bade a resolute farewell to the liberty, the
comparative youth, the light step, leaping impulses and secret pleasures, that
I had enjoyed in the disguise of Hyde. I made this choice perhaps with some
unconscious reservation, for I neither gave up the house in Soho, nor destroyed
the clothes of Edward Hyde, which still lay ready in my cabinet. For two
months, however, I was true to my determination; for two months, I led a life
of such severity as I had never before attained to, and enjoyed the
compensations of an approving conscience. But time began at last to obliterate
the freshness of my alarm; the praises of conscience began to grow into a thing
of course; I began to be tortured with throes and longings, as of Hyde
struggling after freedom; and at last, in an hour of moral weakness, I once
again compounded and swallowed the transforming draught.
</p>
<p>
I do not suppose that, when a drunkard reasons with himself upon his vice, he
is once out of five hundred times affected by the dangers that he runs through
his brutish, physical insensibility; neither had I, long as I had considered my
position, made enough allowance for the complete moral insensibility and
insensate readiness to evil, which were the leading characters of Edward Hyde.
Yet it was by these that I was punished. My devil had been long caged, he came
out roaring. I was conscious, even when I took the draught, of a more
unbridled, a more furious propensity to ill. It must have been this, I suppose,
that stirred in my soul that tempest of impatience with which I listened to the
civilities of my unhappy victim; I declare, at least, before God, no man
morally sane could have been guilty of that crime upon so pitiful a
provocation; and that I struck in no more reasonable spirit than that in which
a sick child may break a plaything. But I had voluntarily stripped myself of
all those balancing instincts by which even the worst of us continues to walk
with some degree of steadiness among temptations; and in my case, to be
tempted, however slightly, was to fall.
</p>
<p>
Instantly the spirit of hell awoke in me and raged. With a transport of glee, I
mauled the unresisting body, tasting delight from every blow; and it was not
till weariness had begun to succeed, that I was suddenly, in the top fit of my
delirium, struck through the heart by a cold thrill of terror. A mist
dispersed; I saw my life to be forfeit; and fled from the scene of these
excesses, at once glorying and trembling, my lust of evil gratified and
stimulated, my love of life screwed to the topmost peg. I ran to the house in
Soho, and (to make assurance doubly sure) destroyed my papers; thence I set out
through the lamplit streets, in the same divided ecstasy of mind, gloating on
my crime, light-headedly devising others in the future, and yet still hastening
and still hearkening in my wake for the steps of the avenger. Hyde had a song
upon his lips as he compounded the draught, and as he drank it, pledged the
dead man. The pangs of transformation had not done tearing him, before Henry
Jekyll, with streaming tears of gratitude and remorse, had fallen upon his
knees and lifted his clasped hands to God. The veil of self-indulgence was rent
from head to foot. I saw my life as a whole: I followed it up from the days of
childhood, when I had walked with my father’s hand, and through the
self-denying toils of my professional life, to arrive again and again, with the
same sense of unreality, at the damned horrors of the evening. I could have
screamed aloud; I sought with tears and prayers to smother down the crowd of
hideous images and sounds with which my memory swarmed against me; and still,
between the petitions, the ugly face of my iniquity stared into my soul. As the
acuteness of this remorse began to die away, it was succeeded by a sense of
joy. The problem of my conduct was solved. Hyde was thenceforth impossible;
whether I would or not, I was now confined to the better part of my existence;
and O, how I rejoiced to think of it! with what willing humility I embraced
anew the restrictions of natural life! with what sincere renunciation I locked
the door by which I had so often gone and come, and ground the key under my
heel!
</p>
<p>
The next day, came the news that the murder had not been overlooked, that the
guilt of Hyde was patent to the world, and that the victim was a man high in
public estimation. It was not only a crime, it had been a tragic folly. I think
I was glad to know it; I think I was glad to have my better impulses thus
buttressed and guarded by the terrors of the scaffold. Jekyll was now my city
of refuge; let but Hyde peep out an instant, and the hands of all men would be
raised to take and slay him.
</p>
<p>
I resolved in my future conduct to redeem the past; and I can say with honesty
that my resolve was fruitful of some good. You know yourself how earnestly, in
the last months of the last year, I laboured to relieve suffering; you know
that much was done for others, and that the days passed quietly, almost happily
for myself. Nor can I truly say that I wearied of this beneficent and innocent
life; I think instead that I daily enjoyed it more completely; but I was still
cursed with my duality of purpose; and as the first edge of my penitence wore
off, the lower side of me, so long indulged, so recently chained down, began to
growl for licence. Not that I dreamed of resuscitating Hyde; the bare idea of
that would startle me to frenzy: no, it was in my own person that I was once
more tempted to trifle with my conscience; and it was as an ordinary secret
sinner that I at last fell before the assaults of temptation.
</p>
<p>
There comes an end to all things; the most capacious measure is filled at last;
and this brief condescension to my evil finally destroyed the balance of my
soul. And yet I was not alarmed; the fall seemed natural, like a return to the
old days before I had made my discovery. It was a fine, clear, January day, wet
under foot where the frost had melted, but cloudless overhead; and the
Regent’s Park was full of winter chirrupings and sweet with spring
odours. I sat in the sun on a bench; the animal within me licking the chops of
memory; the spiritual side a little drowsed, promising subsequent penitence,
but not yet moved to begin. After all, I reflected, I was like my neighbours;
and then I smiled, comparing myself with other men, comparing my active
good-will with the lazy cruelty of their neglect. And at the very moment of
that vainglorious thought, a qualm came over me, a horrid nausea and the most
deadly shuddering. These passed away, and left me faint; and then as in its
turn faintness subsided, I began to be aware of a change in the temper of my
thoughts, a greater boldness, a contempt of danger, a solution of the bonds of
obligation. I looked down; my clothes hung formlessly on my shrunken limbs; the
hand that lay on my knee was corded and hairy. I was once more Edward Hyde. A
moment before I had been safe of all men’s respect, wealthy,
beloved—the cloth laying for me in the dining-room at home; and now I was
the common quarry of mankind, hunted, houseless, a known murderer, thrall to
the gallows.
</p>
<p>
My reason wavered, but it did not fail me utterly. I have more than once
observed that in my second character, my faculties seemed sharpened to a point
and my spirits more tensely elastic; thus it came about that, where Jekyll
perhaps might have succumbed, Hyde rose to the importance of the moment. My
drugs were in one of the presses of my cabinet; how was I to reach them? That
was the problem that (crushing my temples in my hands) I set myself to solve.
The laboratory door I had closed. If I sought to enter by the house, my own
servants would consign me to the gallows. I saw I must employ another hand, and
thought of Lanyon. How was he to be reached? how persuaded? Supposing that I
escaped capture in the streets, how was I to make my way into his presence? and
how should I, an unknown and displeasing visitor, prevail on the famous
physician to rifle the study of his colleague, Dr. Jekyll? Then I remembered
that of my original character, one part remained to me: I could write my own
hand; and once I had conceived that kindling spark, the way that I must follow
became lighted up from end to end.
</p>
<p>
Thereupon, I arranged my clothes as best I could, and summoning a passing
hansom, drove to an hotel in Portland Street, the name of which I chanced to
remember. At my appearance (which was indeed comical enough, however tragic a
fate these garments covered) the driver could not conceal his mirth. I gnashed
my teeth upon him with a gust of devilish fury; and the smile withered from his
face—happily for him—yet more happily for myself, for in another
instant I had certainly dragged him from his perch. At the inn, as I entered, I
looked about me with so black a countenance as made the attendants tremble; not
a look did they exchange in my presence; but obsequiously took my orders, led
me to a private room, and brought me wherewithal to write. Hyde in danger of
his life was a creature new to me; shaken with inordinate anger, strung to the
pitch of murder, lusting to inflict pain. Yet the creature was astute; mastered
his fury with a great effort of the will; composed his two important letters,
one to Lanyon and one to Poole; and that he might receive actual evidence of
their being posted, sent them out with directions that they should be
registered. Thenceforward, he sat all day over the fire in the private room,
gnawing his nails; there he dined, sitting alone with his fears, the waiter
visibly quailing before his eye; and thence, when the night was fully come, he
set forth in the corner of a closed cab, and was driven to and fro about the
streets of the city. He, I say—I cannot say, I. That child of Hell had
nothing human; nothing lived in him but fear and hatred. And when at last,
thinking the driver had begun to grow suspicious, he discharged the cab and
ventured on foot, attired in his misfitting clothes, an object marked out for
observation, into the midst of the nocturnal passengers, these two base
passions raged within him like a tempest. He walked fast, hunted by his fears,
chattering to himself, skulking through the less frequented thoroughfares,
counting the minutes that still divided him from midnight. Once a woman spoke
to him, offering, I think, a box of lights. He smote her in the face, and she
fled.
</p>
<p>
When I came to myself at Lanyon’s, the horror of my old friend perhaps
affected me somewhat: I do not know; it was at least but a drop in the sea to
the abhorrence with which I looked back upon these hours. A change had come
over me. It was no longer the fear of the gallows, it was the horror of being
Hyde that racked me. I received Lanyon’s condemnation partly in a dream;
it was partly in a dream that I came home to my own house and got into bed. I
slept after the prostration of the day, with a stringent and profound slumber
which not even the nightmares that wrung me could avail to break. I awoke in
the morning shaken, weakened, but refreshed. I still hated and feared the
thought of the brute that slept within me, and I had not of course forgotten
the appalling dangers of the day before; but I was once more at home, in my own
house and close to my drugs; and gratitude for my escape shone so strong in my
soul that it almost rivalled the brightness of hope.
</p>
<p>
I was stepping leisurely across the court after breakfast, drinking the chill
of the air with pleasure, when I was seized again with those indescribable
sensations that heralded the change; and I had but the time to gain the shelter
of my cabinet, before I was once again raging and freezing with the passions of
Hyde. It took on this occasion a double dose to recall me to myself; and alas!
six hours after, as I sat looking sadly in the fire, the pangs returned, and
the drug had to be re-administered. In short, from that day forth it seemed
only by a great effort as of gymnastics, and only under the immediate
stimulation of the drug, that I was able to wear the countenance of Jekyll. At
all hours of the day and night, I would be taken with the premonitory shudder;
above all, if I slept, or even dozed for a moment in my chair, it was always as
Hyde that I awakened. Under the strain of this continually impending doom and
by the sleeplessness to which I now condemned myself, ay, even beyond what I
had thought possible to man, I became, in my own person, a creature eaten up
and emptied by fever, languidly weak both in body and mind, and solely occupied
by one thought: the horror of my other self. But when I slept, or when the
virtue of the medicine wore off, I would leap almost without transition (for
the pangs of transformation grew daily less marked) into the possession of a
fancy brimming with images of terror, a soul boiling with causeless hatreds,
and a body that seemed not strong enough to contain the raging energies of
life. The powers of Hyde seemed to have grown with the sickliness of Jekyll.
And certainly the hate that now divided them was equal on each side. With
Jekyll, it was a thing of vital instinct. He had now seen the full deformity of
that creature that shared with him some of the phenomena of consciousness, and
was co-heir with him to death: and beyond these links of community, which in
themselves made the most poignant part of his distress, he thought of Hyde, for
all his energy of life, as of something not only hellish but inorganic. This
was the shocking thing; that the slime of the pit seemed to utter cries and
voices; that the amorphous dust gesticulated and sinned; that what was dead,
and had no shape, should usurp the offices of life. And this again, that that
insurgent horror was knit to him closer than a wife, closer than an eye; lay
caged in his flesh, where he heard it mutter and felt it struggle to be born;
and at every hour of weakness, and in the confidence of slumber, prevailed
against him, and deposed him out of life. The hatred of Hyde for Jekyll was of
a different order. His terror of the gallows drove him continually to commit
temporary suicide, and return to his subordinate station of a part instead of a
person; but he loathed the necessity, he loathed the despondency into which
Jekyll was now fallen, and he resented the dislike with which he was himself
regarded. Hence the ape-like tricks that he would play me, scrawling in my own
hand blasphemies on the pages of my books, burning the letters and destroying
the portrait of my father; and indeed, had it not been for his fear of death,
he would long ago have ruined himself in order to involve me in the ruin. But
his love of life is wonderful; I go further: I, who sicken and freeze at the mere
thought of him, when I recall the abjection and passion of this attachment, and
when I know how he fears my power to cut him off by suicide, I find it in my
heart to pity him.
</p>
<p>
It is useless, and the time awfully fails me, to prolong this description; no
one has ever suffered such torments, let that suffice; and yet even to these,
habit brought—no, not alleviation—but a certain callousness of
soul, a certain acquiescence of despair; and my punishment might have gone on
for years, but for the last calamity which has now fallen, and which has
finally severed me from my own face and nature. My provision of the salt, which
had never been renewed since the date of the first experiment, began to run
low. I sent out for a fresh supply and mixed the draught; the ebullition
followed, and the first change of colour, not the second; I drank it and it was
without efficiency. You will learn from Poole how I have had London ransacked;
it was in vain; and I am now persuaded that my first supply was impure, and
that it was that unknown impurity which lent efficacy to the draught.
</p>
<p>
About a week has passed, and I am now finishing this statement under the
influence of the last of the old powders. This, then, is the last time, short
of a miracle, that Henry Jekyll can think his own thoughts or see his own face
(now how sadly altered!) in the glass. Nor must I delay too long to bring my
writing to an end; for if my narrative has hitherto escaped destruction, it has
been by a combination of great prudence and great good luck. Should the throes
of change take me in the act of writing it, Hyde will tear it in pieces; but if
some time shall have elapsed after I have laid it by, his wonderful selfishness
and circumscription to the moment will probably save it once again from the
action of his ape-like spite. And indeed the doom that is closing on us both
has already changed and crushed him. Half an hour from now, when I shall again
and forever reindue that hated personality, I know how I shall sit shuddering
and weeping in my chair, or continue, with the most strained and fearstruck
ecstasy of listening, to pace up and down this room (my last earthly refuge)
and give ear to every sound of menace. Will Hyde die upon the scaffold? or will
he find courage to release himself at the last moment? God knows; I am
careless; this is my true hour of death, and what is to follow concerns another
than myself. Here then, as I lay down the pen and proceed to seal up my
confession, I bring the life of that unhappy Henry Jekyll to an end.
</p>
		</section>
	</body>
</html>
